Monday, December 21, 2009

PyPy has recently made some great speed and memory progress towards providing the most efficient Python interpreter out there. We also just announced
our plans for the pypy-1.2 release. Much of this is driven by personal
commitment, by individuals and companies investing time and money.
Now we'd appreciate some feedback and help regarding getting money
into the PyPy project to help its core members (between
5 and 15 people depending how you count) to sustain themselves. We see
several options:

use a foundation structure and ask for tax-exempt donations to the
project, its developers and infrastructure. We just got
a letter from the Software Freedom Conservancy that they view
our application favourably so this option becomes practical hopefully
soon.

offer to implement certain features like a 64bit JIT-backend,
Numpy for PyPy or a streamlined installation in exchange for money,
contributed in small portions/donations. Do you imagine you or your
company would sponsor PyPy on a small scale for efforts like this?
Any other bits you'd like to see?

offer to implement larger scale tasks by contracting PyPy related companies,
namely Open End and merlinux who have successfully done such
contracts in the past. Please don't hesitate to contact
holger@merlinux.eu and bea@openend.se if you want to start a
conversation on this.

apply for public/state funding - in fact we are likely to get some
funding through Eurostars, more on that separately. Such funding
is usually only a 50-60% percentage of actual employment and
project costs, and is tied to research questions rather than
to make PyPy a production-useable interpreter, though.

Anything else we should look out for?

cheers & thanks for any feedback,
Maciej and Holger

PyPy has recently made some great speed and memory progress towards providing the most efficient Python interpreter out there. We also just announced
our plans for the pypy-1.2 release. Much of this is driven by personal
commitment, by individuals and companies investing time and money.
Now we'd appreciate some feedback and help regarding getting money
into the PyPy project to help its core members (between
5 and 15 people depending how you count) to sustain themselves. We see
several options:

use a foundation structure and ask for tax-exempt donations to the
project, its developers and infrastructure. We just got
a letter from the Software Freedom Conservancy that they view
our application favourably so this option becomes practical hopefully
soon.

offer to implement certain features like a 64bit JIT-backend,
Numpy for PyPy or a streamlined installation in exchange for money,
contributed in small portions/donations. Do you imagine you or your
company would sponsor PyPy on a small scale for efforts like this?
Any other bits you'd like to see?

offer to implement larger scale tasks by contracting PyPy related companies,
namely Open End and merlinux who have successfully done such
contracts in the past. Please don't hesitate to contact
holger@merlinux.eu and bea@openend.se if you want to start a
conversation on this.

apply for public/state funding - in fact we are likely to get some
funding through Eurostars, more on that separately. Such funding
is usually only a 50-60% percentage of actual employment and
project costs, and is tied to research questions rather than
to make PyPy a production-useable interpreter, though.

Thursday, December 17, 2009

The PyPy core team is planning to make a new release before the next Pycon US.

The main target of the 1.2 release is packaging the good results
we have achieved applying our current JIT compiler generator to our
Python interpreter. Some of that progress has beenchronicled inrecent posts on the status blog. By releasing them in a
relatively stable prototype we want to encourage people to try them with their
own code and to gather feedback in this way. By construction the JIT compiler
should support all Python features, what may vary are the speedups
achieved (in some cases the JIT may produce worse results than the PyPy
interpreter which we would like to know) and the extra memory required
by it.

For the 1.2 release we will focus on the JIT stability first, less on
improving non-strictly JIT areas. The JIT should be good at many things
as shown by previous blog postings. We want the JIT compiler in the
release to work well on Intel 32 bits on Linux, with Mac OS X and
Windows being secondary targets. Which compilation targets work will
depend a bit on contributions.

In order to finalize the release we intend to have a concentrated
effort ("virtual sprint") from the 22nd to the 29th of
January. Coordination will happen as usual through the #pypy irc
channel on freenode. Samuele Pedroni will take the role of release
manager as he already did in the past.

The PyPy core team is planning to make a new release before the next Pycon US.

The main target of the 1.2 release is packaging the good results
we have achieved applying our current JIT compiler generator to our
Python interpreter. Some of that progress has beenchronicled inrecent posts on the status blog. By releasing them in a
relatively stable prototype we want to encourage people to try them with their
own code and to gather feedback in this way. By construction the JIT compiler
should support all Python features, what may vary are the speedups
achieved (in some cases the JIT may produce worse results than the PyPy
interpreter which we would like to know) and the extra memory required
by it.

For the 1.2 release we will focus on the JIT stability first, less on
improving non-strictly JIT areas. The JIT should be good at many things
as shown by previous blog postings. We want the JIT compiler in the
release to work well on Intel 32 bits on Linux, with Mac OS X and
Windows being secondary targets. Which compilation targets work will
depend a bit on contributions.

In order to finalize the release we intend to have a concentrated
effort ("virtual sprint") from the 22nd to the 29th of
January. Coordination will happen as usual through the #pypy irc
channel on freenode. Samuele Pedroni will take the role of release
manager as he already did in the past.